Archive for the ‘Public Records’ Category

The Sacramento County, California Sheriff has developed its own inmate release notification – Sheriff’s Inmate Release Elective Notification System (SIRENS) – that replaces the multi-agency VINELink (Victim Information and Notification) Everyday) program. The SIRENS service, like VINELink, will alert registered users by phone, text or email after a specified inmate is released. (See the SIRENS brochure for instructions.) Start by looking up the full name in the inmate search database.

Hopefully, VINELink won’t drop their Sacramento County incarcerated offender name search because it’s more flexible than the one at the Sheriff’s website. Both were functional today. The Sheriff’s site requires a full first name and full last name to find an inmate. That’s not helpful if you want to see everyone with the same last name — which you’ll want to do if you only have a nickname. Or maybe you want to see all of the possible relatives simultaneously incarcerated, right? The VINELink database can be searched with a partial first name AND a partial last name.

But these databases are better in tandem because the inmate information shown by the Sacramento Sheriff is more detailed. Alias’ and DOB’s are shown for those in custody and for released inmates, along with their release date. Because the date of birth is excised for out-of-custody inmates on VINELink you don’t know whether the “James Johnson’s” listed are the same person, or whether they are a match with those at the Sheriff’s site.

But neither site had private investigators in mind when they developed these tools.

There are many substantial collections of genealogical materials — telephone and city directories, school alumni directories, newspapers, electronic subscription databases — in San Francisco Bay Area specialty libraries.

The California Genealogical Library and Society is located in downtown Oakland. I mentioned this resource at my Google+ site. See the list of their United States City Directories — available only to members, accessible to anyone for a small fee. One room of the library is dedicated to the extensive collection of California telephone books and city directories. A few college alumni directories are also here. The subscription databases available onsite include Newspaperarchive.com (see their California collection) and the state birth, marriage, divorce and death indexes from Vitalsearch covering 21 states, including California.

The most extensive collection of family history and genealogical resources west of Salt Lake City is in the Bay Area, housed at the Sutro Library, a branch of the California State Library and located in San Francisco. Their collection of 20,000 city directories and 10,000 telephone books is a gift of gold to those of us who are Bay Area private investigators — a professional field that prized these tools to locate people and businesses and reverse telephone numbers long before there were electronic databases.

The Family History Center in Oakland can order microfilmed copies of some California birth, death and marriage certificates from the repository in Salt Lake City. You pay a modest fee of $5.

My prior post on Genealogical Resources in U.S. Federal Depository Libraries is still current and I’ve updated the links in Find historical records – 50 state list. Future posts will address free 20th century genealogical databases on the Internet of interest to private investigators. Meanwhile, peruse these genealogy resources and links.

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• Washington State Death Index and SSDI

• Oregon State Archives: Oregon Historical Records Index

• Social Security Death Index – Montana

• State Archives and Historical Societies

• 1940 Census Records – Everything You Need To Know

• Crime Alerts from your police department

• Web Search Techniques Webinars

• California City/County Search

• Verify Voter Registration Status – 50 State Directory

• Scottish Courts – Search records and judgments

• Washington State Digital Archives – Vital records, cemeteries, military records

• Social Security Death Index Search

• Canada Marriages – French-language Roman Catholic parishes, Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec

• Searching the Social Security Death Index in One Step

• U.S. Social Security Death Index

• Social Security Death Index SSDI Records Search

• Where to Write for Vital Records

• Military and Bioterrorism resources

The rest of my favorite links are here.

I wondered what topics I covered this year in my posts so I thought you might appreciate a summary. Since the government agencies often don’t give a context for their online public records — inclusive dates, search function, excluded data — I investigated how this could mislead the researcher in Public records and newspaper databases – Are they what you think they are?.

Database resellers that provide online fee-based public records to the consumer often mislead the researcher and are not transparent about costs or data sources and limitations. I explored these concerns in Follow the identity trail of data brokers and Due Diligence on consumer data brokers.

You can Wildcard your county public record searches in the online public record databases and the computer index at the county court or county Recorder to enable more flexible searching of your terms. If you’re researching a birth, death or marriage at the county Recorder where the document was filed try the search techniques for finding someone in a public record. I gave some specific court examples in Research Tip: California Court Online Case Indexes.

The Social Security Death Index is falling victim to the identity theft scare, curtailing access to public records, even when the positive uses outweigh the destructive and the linkage between online public records such as the SSDI and fraud is slight. The Social Security Death Index is now restricted and will become more so in the near future.

Every month, I summarize the links I collected in the prior month on public record sources, Internet search techniques, legal news and online search tools and databases. You can read those at PIbuzz or search and subscribe to the links as I post them.

And you can add your comment to the discussion of the posts — look in the “Recent Comments” section in the sidebar at PI buzz.

[Update, 1/29/2012: The Subcommittee on Social Security of the House Ways & Means Committee is meeting (February 2, 2012) and will address legislation that would restrict access to the SSDI. Read more at: Sounding a call to action to save our access to the SSDI.]

A change in Social Security Administration policy that went into effect November 1 has lead to the removal of the free online Social Security Death Index, also known as SSDI, from Rootsweb and other genealogy sites. But that’s not all. The Social Security Administration is going to remove 4 million current name records and cease reporting other data in new records. One popular fee-based data provider is going to stop displaying the Social Security number for anyone who has died in the last 10 years. This is a profound blow to genealogists and fraud investigators.

The SSA Public Death Master File aka Social Security Death Index has come under political assault as a source of Social Security numbers used to craft false identities. As Dick Eastman rightly argues in “Genealogists are Losing Access to SSDI, Mostly Due to Misinformation,” this is another case of misplaced concerns about the dissemination of personal information. The fallacy of the identity theft argument is detailed in “Are We Going to Lose the Social Security Death Index (SSDI)?”.

The background on the SSA’s explanation is cited at Steve’s Genealogy Blog, “Changes to the Public Death Master File (DMF) and the Social Security Death Index (SSDI)”.

What will be removed from the Death Master File that the SSA sells to every provider is the state verified data — which comes from the death certificate. That includes the last residence (town, county and zip code) and the location where benefits were sent. (This was confirmed in an email exchange I had with the government agency that distributes the SSA data.) How many times have you made use of that information to find beneficiaries to estates and pensions, connected separated family members, verified identity, researched a genealogy or located where a client’s family lived when a relative died? All the time.

Here’s what the Social Security Administration announced upon the release of the DVD version of the SSDI (in 2005):

The SSA Death Master File is used by leading government, financial, investigative, credit reporting, medical research and other industries to verify identity as well as to prevent fraud and comply with the USA Patriot Act.

The excitement has worn off. Fear prevails.

And there’s more. The largest genealogy data provider, Ancestry.com, announced (after political pressure was applied) that “…we have recently made a purposeful decision to not display Social Security numbers of any person that has passed away in the last 10 years.”

And more extensive restrictions are now in place for the release of information in the Social Security application — which has the parents’ names and place of birth of the applicant. Again, serious researchers will loose out.

Some free sources of the SSDI are still online but they aren’t as flexible as the Rootsweb interface and may have less data. I have links to these, other vital records at my directory of public records resources.

• The British Newspaper Archive

• Obtaining EDs and streets for the 1910-1940 Census in One Step

• California Death Index 1940-1997

• California Birth Index – Free

• SimilarPages.com – Find similar websites

• SimilarSiteSearch.com – Find Similar Websites

• Company Director Check – free UK company director search

• Craigslist Alerts at List-Alert.com

• Open Status Search – Search Facebook without logging in

• Kurrently – A real-time search engine for Facebook and Twitter.

• Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine

• DuckDuckGo Search Engine

• Users Guide and Form Letter for The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)

The rest of my favorite links are here.